Copy to Clipboard

Hello guys.

I have an issue when I try to copy data to clipboard.
I have 4 textboxes and I want all data from these 4 textboxes to be copied to clipboard.
I wrote these few line of code, but I manage to copy the data from the first textbox only.
Obviously, I am missing something...

Code:

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Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

Dim J as control

 For Each Me.J In Me.Controls
            If TypeOf J Is TextBox Then
                If J.Text <> "" Then
                    Clipboard.SetText(J.Text)
                End If
            End If
        Next J

End Sub

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you need to combine all of the values first before setting the value of the clipboard like below

Code:

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Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

Dim J as control
Dim sb As Text.StringBuilder = New Text.StringBuilder()
 For Each Me.J In Me.Controls
            If TypeOf J Is TextBox Then
                If J.Text <> "" Then
                    CombinedValue.Append(J.Text & Environment.NewLine)
                End If
            End If
        Next J
Clipboard.SetText(CombinedValue.ToString)
End Sub

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Alternatively you could also use String.Concat:

Code:

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Clipboard.SetText(String.Concat((From txt As TextBox In Me.Controls.OfType(Of TextBox)() Select txt.Text)))

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LINQ - what horrible stuff!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Leary222

LINQ - what horrible stuff!

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Sorry that it's not backwards compatible and requires forward thinking, but considering that LINQ just cut down your 10 lines down to 1... what makes this particular example horrible?

@Leary222 & dday9
Doesn't seem to work.
I get these errors

Error 2 'CombinedValue' is not declared. It may be inaccessible due to its protection level
Error 1 'Text' is ambiguous, imported from the namespaces or types 'System, System.Drawing'.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by stratos

@Leary222 & dday9
Doesn't seem to work.
I get these errors

Error 2 'CombinedValue' is not declared. It may be inaccessible due to its protection level
Error 1 'Text' is ambiguous, imported from the namespaces or types 'System, System.Drawing'.

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With my example, are you accidentally using:

Code:

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Clipboard.SetText(String.Concat((From text As TextBox In Me.Controls.OfType(Of TextBox)() Select text.Text)))

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If so then I think that could cause the error. I'm not using a variable named CombinedValue in my example so I'm assuming that is Leary222's error which it appears to be a typo, replace CombinedValue with sb.

Seems to work now but there is still an issue.

Code:

---

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

Dim J as control

 For Each Me.J In Me.Controls

            If TypeOf J Is TextBox Then
                If J.Text <> "" Then
                    Clipboard.SetText(String.Concat((From txt As TextBox In Me.Controls.OfType(Of TextBox)() Select txt.Text)))               
                End If
            End If
        Next J

End Sub

---

All data are copied but they are all stacked in one line with no Spaces and backwards

(i.e. Let's say that I input these data in 4 textboxes: 23.5 12 90.6 56.1.
The code export that "56.190.61223.5")

You do not need to include all the looping mess, that is why I used LINQ in the first place. If it is backwards then you can reverse the array. If you want to include a space between each TextBox then use String.Join instead:

Code:

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Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
    Clipboard.SetText(String.Join(" ", (From txt As TextBox In Me.Controls.OfType(Of TextBox)() Select txt.Text).Reverse()))
End Sub

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Thanks! It's fine now. :thumb:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dday9

Sorry that it's not backwards compatible and requires forward thinking, but considering that LINQ just cut down your 10 lines down to 1... what makes this particular example horrible?

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Sorry dday, now realize that my comment is unproductive.

personally i dont like the idea of 'unmannged code ' in the sense that it looks a bit like sql and visual studio wont highlight any syntax errors with it and its probably converted back to something similar to my code after the overhead of parsing your string.

Quote:

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personally i dont like the idea of 'unmannged code ' in the sense that it looks a bit like sql

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You do not have to use a SQL style syntax, you can use this in its place:

Code:

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Clipboard.SetText(String.Join(" ", Me.Controls.OfType(Of TextBox)().Select(Function(txt) txt.Text).Reverse()))

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However, I simply prefer the SQL style syntax for queries such as this.

Quote:

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visual studio wont highlight any syntax errors with it

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What version of Visual Studios are you using?! Since its release of LINQ, I have never had an instance where Visual Studios did not pick up a syntax error. Now as of Visual Studios 2015 they've added more extensive support for LINQ with IntelliSense as well as the ability for the debugger to debug expressions where as in in previous versions that was not available.

Quote:

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its probably converted back to something similar to my code after the overhead of parsing your string.

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There is no doubt that you will take a performance hit when using LINQ. What you need to do is balance the relationship between the need to update/maintain code and readability vs. straight performance and this is exactly a case where I would justify using a one line LINQ statement that queries all TextBox controls located on a Form and returning their Text over having to iterate through each control, checking if the Type is a TextBox, checking if the Text is not empty, and then appending the Text to a StringBuilder.

Just for Schlitz-and-Giggles I've decided to do a performance test. When you ran both a LINQ and StringBuilder examples as provided by both of us the amount of time that it took to iterate through 10 arbitrary types it took 0 milliseconds. When I did the same test only repeating the examples 10,000 times LINQ took 20 milliseconds and StringBuilder took 10 milliseconds. My point is that the user will only be doing this one at a time, not repeatedly so the performance hit doesn't matter.

Here is a fiddle of the test that I did: https://dotnetfiddle.net/auuuJs

Ha - unsupprisingly i stand corrected.....

i thought thats linq was passed like "do linq" - not sure why i thought that probably on the basis id never used it because i didn't like the look of it.

i now see VS does offer syntax support - because its not a string like i thought it was.

i much prefer the alternative approach you posted - thanks for broadening my mind lol